These Ghostly Archives 3 - A website for Sylvia Plath

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These Ghostly Archives 3
Gail Crowther & Peter K. Steinberg
Archives do start conversations, make connections across time, and deserve
universal recognition because of their uniqueness and enduring value. (Brinati 3)
Historically, the primary means to an archive and its holdings is an in-person visit. Over the last
two and half years, we have travelled to the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading, England,
the British Library in London, as well as to Smith College and Indiana University, which are
sites of the two biggest archives of Sylvia Plath material, to highlight the thrill of the archival
hunt. In the process, we have made archival discoveries that still seem somewhat improbable
given the amount of attention and research given to Plath over the last few decades.
Shortly after we published "These Ghostly Archives, Redux" in Plath Profiles 3, the idea
for this paper took shape as several "new" archival finds presented themselves.1 "New" finds is
an awkward phrase both to the archivist and the researcher, especially in collections that have
been housed and cataloged for years. Archivists know their collections through processing and
experience. The materials are located either through the older card catalog systems or more
recently through online catalogs and finding aids. The latter may be accessed from almost
anywhere using the Internet, and as a result archival collections take on a new life when
combined with powerful search "engines" such as Google, which can "chuff" browsers, far and
wide, to disparate sections of the virtual world in a matter of seconds. In this sense, archives take
on another layer of ghostliness, as they exist in that curious virtual space that somehow manages
to be both there and not there at the same time.
In the absence of digital representations of Plath's papers, in which original documents
are scanned at a high resolution and presented via a web site, photocopies, scans, in-person
handling must serve to satisfy our archival demands. Initially, the goal of our project this time
was to handle and relate our archival finds purely via distance requests: by using Google, online
catalogs, and finding aids for materials and then requesting photocopies or digital surrogates.
1
See "These Ghostly Archives, Redux" at http://www.iun.edu/~nwadmin/plath/vol3/Crowther_Steinberg.pdf. This
paper followed "These Ghostly Archives" from Plath Profiles 2
(http://www.iun.edu/~nwadmin/plath/vol2/Crowther_Steinberg.pdf).
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This was not entirely possible for a number of reasons, which include: 1) as much as archives
attempt to standardize procedures, individual repository policies vary greatly and do not always
allow a collection to be accessed in this manner; 2) not everything is available online; and 3)
staying away from libraries and archives is a lot more difficult than we imagined. As we have
tried to convey, it is the "stuff" of the archive that has both a transformative effect on the viewed
material and on the person doing the viewing. Photocopies and other formats of surrogates lack
the immediacy of holding the physical item; and through no fault of those performing cataloging
duties, descriptions can fail to convey exactly the content of the item described. If we take the
following two examples from "These Ghostly Archives, Redux," we see this played out to suit
the point.
In the Alvarez papers, the British Library catalog gives the following descriptions for two
of its holdings: "'Landscape of childhood', transcript of a radio broadcast for the B.B.C. Home
Service; n.d. Typewritten" and "'New poems'; n.d. Typewritten, with brief commentaries" (bl.uk).
In both cases, these documents mean something to the Plath reader. The first being a near
verbatim word reordering of "Ocean 1212-W," Plath's commissioned script which begins, "My
childhood landscape was not land but the end of land" (Johnny Panic 123). The second catalog
entry describes the introductions to a group of eight poems reproduced as an appendix in Ariel:
The Restored Edition (2004). Obtaining photocopies is difficult since the policy of the British
Library is that the researcher must obtain permission of the copyright holder. In this instance, it
made sense for Gail to visit the archive. As we learned from her visit, the typescript of
"Landscape of a Childhood" contains original Plath text; text that was ultimately cut by her
editors from the final published and broadcast version and never subsequently reinstated in the
Johnny Panic version of the story reproduced years later. In addition, the B.B.C. script of "New
Poems" Plath prepared on December 14, 1962, actually was comprised of twelve poems; and the
British Library copy includes four additional authorial statements about her poems. These were
previously unknown (or unacknowledged) to Plath scholars and remain mostly unpublished.2
And so this call to the archive combines both visits made via the Internet and in person.
We will present a never before published photograph of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, taken in
New York City in June of 1958, which is held at Indiana University. We will also show two
2
See "These Ghostly Archives, Redux," pages and 233-234, 237-238, and 242-243. In his "'That Alchemical
Power': The Literary Relationship of A. Alvarez and Sylvia Plath" (The Cambridge Quarterly 39:3, September
2010, 217-236), William Wooten reprints Plath's introduction to "Letter in November" on page 235.
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photographs of Court Green and its property from the early 1970s, held at the University of
Maryland, College Park. These images capture the actual "strangle of branches" of Plath's poem
"Elm," which as a result of Dutch Elm disease are no longer standing (Plath, Collected Poems
193). These trees, which had such a profound influence on Plath's poetic vision, and occur
repeatedly in her later poems, are seen here for the first time in more than a generation.
However, even though these "successes" are evidence of fruitful archival research, not
every inquiry made has such an outcome. Such is the case with the Heinemann archives, now
housed at the corporate archives of Random House Group in England. Gail returned to the
British Library to review the Plath related materials in the Hughes-Baskin papers and the
recently opened collection of Hughes material purchased in 2009, both with mixed success. As
we have in the past, we weave our archival experiences together, creating a unique, time-bending
narrative of discovery through archival collaboration.
PKS: Familiar enough with the Plath Mss. holdings at the Lilly Library at Indiana University,
Bloomington, I visit their website to see if anything else might be held by them about which I did
not know. Their "Collections" webpage has a search box and I type in "Sylvia Plath" to see what
the returns are.3 I page through the results, pausing a few times to read the collection descriptions
of the Sanazaro Mss. and the Wagner-Martin Mss.4 But it is the Oscar Williams Mss. that grabs
my attention.5
Containing correspondence, notebooks, poetry, and photographs by Williams, the
collection also holds manuscript materials by other writers, including Plath. In browsing through
the rest of the of the Williams materials, I navigate to the list of photographs in Series VIII. It
lists there are five photographs of Sylvia Plath.6 I wrote to the Lilly Library to ask which poems
are present and if they could describe the photographs. The next day I received an email
reporting that the poems are: "Full Fathom Five," "Sculptor," "Black Rook in Rainy Weather,"
"On The Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad," "Sow," "Departure of the Ghost," and "November
Graveyard, Haworth." Of the photographs, the archivist lets me know that he found only four
3
http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/collections.shtml
http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/lilly/mss/html/sanazaro.html and
http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/lilly/mss/html/wagmart.html
5
http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/lilly/mss/html/williamsoscar.html
6
http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/lilly/mss/subfile/williamsophotos.html
4
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images: one of Plath reclining in a lawn chair, one of Ted Hughes also reclining in a lawn chair,
one of the both of them standing with a skyline in the background, and one of Plath with Oscar
Williams. He lets me know that scans can be made; I place an official order and write to Gail.
GC: Oscar Williams (1900-1964) was an American poet who had initially made contact
with Plath and Hughes by mailing them a recording of his late wife, Gene Derwood,
reading her poetry.7 He was also editor of a revised edition of The Pocket Book of
Modern Verse, (1958) in which he included three poems by Ted Hughes. Plath first
mentions Williams in her journals on January 21, 1958, in which she muses on having
never met him and the power of his dead wife's poetry. Writing about Derwood (in a way
many of us now write about Plath herself), she states about the recording: "So blown
ghost she comes to our tea, more substantial then many inarticulate mortals. That is
strange: the deadness of a stranger who is somehow never dead – the knife of death
unfelt…." (Journals 315). Williams then gets periodical mentions in Plath's journals, but
what interested Peter and myself was her statement on April 30, 1958 that she had
received "a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the
impossible last day of my classes" (Journals 385). This would place the party in May –
or rather more accurately, unless there was a last minute change in Plath's teaching
timetable - May 22. For whatever reason, it seems likely that the cocktail party was
moved, for both William's photographs and Plath's journal and letters all report a
cocktail party taking place in New York in June of 1958.
Peter and I became interested in placing this New York visit in context.
Sometimes, when researching another's life, there is the temptation to treat each
incident as somehow isolated, because the life there is laid out, fixed in time. We can
dip in and extract moments, occasions, in an artificial way, too easily dragging them out
of time and context. None of us live our lives in such a fragmented, snap-shot way.
There is, however tenuous, some sense of continuity, and it seemed important for us to
establish how this visit to Oscar Williams influenced Plath's life as she made the
transition from teaching at Smith to becoming a full-time writer.
7
This record is now held in the Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College.
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PKS: There is a great gap in Plath's Journals from the close of her teaching year at Smith on
May 22 to June 11, 1959, a twenty day silence: an inauspicious start to the experiment of being a
full-time writer. Plath started this entry a few days earlier, on May 19, but got no further than
writing "Monday" (Journals 386). When Plath breaks her silence by picking up her journal
again, she has "much to tell" (392).
It started on Wednesday May 21, when Hughes asked Plath not to attend the performance
of Oedipus as translated by their friend Paul Roche, in which he was participating, reading the
role of Creon. Plath attempted to sneak in to the hall; however, she wrote: "The minute I came in
he knew it, and I knew he knew it" (388). The evening was "stale, rancid" (388).
The Oedipus reading was not the only uncomfortable incident Plath captured in her
journal at this time. Plath remarked that she made a "ceremonial stab" at convincing her husband
to meet her after her class so they could "rejoice" at the semester's conclusion (389). However, at
the appointed time Hughes was not there. The row that followed Hughes' failure to be waiting for
Plath in their car after her last class is almost as well-known as the violent passion that followed
their first meeting at Falcon Yard in Cambridge. She is "disabused of many ideals, visions and
faiths," he is "a liar, a vain smiler, a twister" (386-387). Throughout this long journal entry, Plath
recalled her first impressions of him from the night of February 25, 1956. After the Oedipus
reading, Hughes wore an "odd, lousy smile" which Plath had not seen "since Falcon Yard" (388).
When Plath saw Hughes walking up the path from Paradise Pond with a girl, Hughes had a
"broad, intense smile;" it was "open and engaging" it "took on an ugliness in context" (390).
Then his smile "became too whitehot, became fatuous, admiration-seeking" and Plath fantasized
Hughes transformed as a "black-horned grinning wolf" (390, 391). The pain in Plath's writing
makes this journal passage one of the most excruciating to read; it is a palpable hurt. Plath ends
bluntly, "So what now" (392).
GC: Twenty days later, Plath reports a violent fight between herself and Hughes ("Air
cleared. We are intact"), a total end to her Smith teaching responsibilities and her plans
to live in Boston (Journals 392). Of interest to myself and Peter was her reporting of "our
wearying and also rejuvenating week in New York which cleared out Smith cobwebs"
(393). Cross-checking these dates with her letters, we see Plath writing to her mother
from Northampton on June 10, 1958: "We were very tired but managed an amazing lot
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of fun, meetings and walking for miles in our five days [in New York] (Letters Home
339). She records meeting with Hughes' publishers, dinner at the Biltmore, two parties,
and walking through Central Park, Harlem and taking Hughes to the top of the Empire
State Building. It is very likely that one of these parties was held at the apartment of
Oscar Williams, since in a more detailed letter to her brother, Warren, Plath writes of
drinking Drambuie in a "tiny rooftop studio" (filled with paintings by and photographs of
Gene Derwood, Williams' dead wife) and a "fine little tar-roof porch overlooking the gulls
and boats" (Letters Home 342, 343). As for Williams himself, Plath describes him as "a
queer bird-like little man" yet reports "we got along very well" (Letters Home 342, 343).
Ted Hughes writes to his sister Olwyn that Oscar Williams was "a little bright nice
huckster, ¼ Welshman ¾ jew. Dylan T[homas]'s bosom crony" (Letters of Ted Hughes
125). He also describes, despite not liking New York ("soot, noise, weariness,
cheapjacks and the most pathetic Bohemian district [Greenwich Village])," as an area
that he finds interesting – South Ferry, the very tip of the island (124). It is possible this
area was explored on the day Plath and Hughes visited Oscar Williams, since as you
will see by the photograph to follow, they were pictured very nearby.
PKS: Plath and Hughes visited the home of Oscar Williams at 35 Water Street around June 4,
1958. That particular building no longer stands, having been replaced by a large, modern office
tower. Williams regularly hosted literati at his penthouse apartment and as a practice,
photographed visiting writer(s). Plath and Hughes were no exception. Above, I described the
photographs as they were reported to me. After requesting scans of them from the Lilly Library, I
was both very surprised and a little disappointed. The photograph that was listed as being of
Williams and Plath was a disappointment, since the female in the photograph was not Sylvia
Plath.
The tension that existed between Plath and Hughes at the end of May 1958 really does
seem, in the photographs, to have evaporated and, as Gail says above, the "cobwebs" appear to
have cleared. We publish below, for the first time, a photograph of Plath and Hughes that few
have ever seen. Behind them is Brooklyn, specifically the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.
The tall buildings in the background are in the Court Street/Cadman Plaza area as can be seen by
the Bing map of the area underneath the photograph of Plath and Hughes.
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PKS: It is brilliant to see a previously unpublished, rarely seen photograph of Sylvia Plath,
especially one in which she is smiling! Another two photographs that the Lilly Library made
scans of for me are equally as expressive. One shows Hughes sitting in an Adirondack chair,
hands in his lap (right over left), tie twisted about probably by the wind, shirt-sleeves rolled up to
his elbows, and a sort of a crooked half-grin. A coiled hose snakes behind him. In the photograph
of Plath by herself, she wears a large grin. There is a ghostly impression of a drinking glass in
her hands. Her wrist watch, out of focus, might indicate the time is around five in the afternoon.
She is seated in a padded deck chair.
GC: There is something ghostly about any photograph. Plath herself noted this in her
poem "The Babysitters" when she uses the metaphor "Stopped and awful as a
photograph of somebody laughing,/ But ten years dead" (Collected Poems 175). There
are, of course, fundamental differences in states of photographs. In the image that we
look at, are we present when the photograph was taken? Were we the photographer,
the photographed or merely an attendant? Were we never there at all? In Camera
Lucida, Barthes claims photographs can be the object of three distinct practices; to do,
to undergo, to look. He calls the photographer, "the operator"; the spectator is all of
those who look, and the target, the referent, is the person (or thing) being
photographed. Nevertheless for Barthes the photograph fails to capture that elusive
something of a person. He delightfully states how his self remains "like a bottle-imp,"
which refuses to hold still "giggling in my jar" (12).
Photography, for Roland Barthes, is quite simply about death: "Whether or not
the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. The defeat of time –
that is dead, that will die (96).
So there is a curious paradox at play in a photograph. It is something that both
(re)animates and returns while at the same time, necessarily, reminds us of loss. What
is seemingly gone, suddenly becomes frozen in time. In fact, Susan Sontag claims that
"after the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of
immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed" (11). Plath and
Hughes captured in New York that June are brought back to us via the canvas of the
photograph as alive and smiling as if it were yesterday, as if time had never passed at
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all.
PKS: Not every archival request is as rewarding, however. A fourth photograph included in this
Williams set was of a woman who was misidentified as Plath. My disappointment was severe,
and I wrote to the Lilly to let them know that the female subject of the photograph was not Plath.
At this same time, I was corresponding with Jean Rose, the Library Manager of the
Random House Group in England, regarding whether or not there were Plath letters in the
Heinemann archives. And, yes, they do have some correspondence by and relating to Sylvia
Plath. My query related specifically to correspondence about The Bell Jar, and whether it would
be possible to pin down some of the details of the novels production.8 Photocopies of her letters
were not allowed without the permission of her estate, due, in part, to some of the letters
containing financial information. After several emails asking for permission, Faber – on behalf
of the estate – denied my request save for one letter.9 Not interested in flying to England to see
one letter, I asked both Faber and Rose if they would permit Gail to see the letter if she was
willing to travel to their archive. In the end, the letter – dated January 31, 1962 and addressed to
James Michie – turned out not related to The Bell Jar at all, but about Heinemann's giving
permission for Plath's "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" to be included in a forthcoming Meridian
Books anthology.10
Hoping to set to rights these let downs, Gail planned a trip to the British Library, and I
planned a trip the University of Maryland at College Park, having recently learned of Plath
materials being housed there.
GC: Having browsed the online catalogue for The British Library, I decided there were
two areas that looked interesting. After my visit last year (recounted in "These Ghostly
8
This was an information gathering query for an article I wrote called "Proof of Plath" that was published in the
April 2011 issue of Fine Books & Collections, pp. 11-12.
9
I disagree with the Estate denying us – or anyone – access to these letters, though I do understand that an archive
can set its own policies. My disagreement stems from the out-dated private, financial information. Whatever the
terms of an original contract surely they are null and void, considering at the least that Heinemann lost The Bell Jar
to Faber. Also, because Plath and Hughes, her original estate manager, are both deceased I question whether or not
they have the same rights to privacy that living people have. However, on the other hand, what is important to
understand is that additional Plath materials are out there and this leads to the possibility of their one day being
accessible. We do appreciate Jean Rose's efforts and patience with us during the enquiry process.
10
A letter I saw in the Jane Anderson papers at Smith College may reveal the fate of much of the correspondence
between Plath and Heinemann of an editorial nature regarding Plath's novel. In this letter dated March 14, 1986,
from Roger Smith at Heinemann to Olwyn Hughes, he admits that in a recent move, weeding of their archives took
place and may have included records regarding Plath and The Bell Jar.
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Archives, Redux" Plath Profiles 3), I was curious to discover if there were any other
original Plath manuscripts held in the material there. The folders that looked promising
were related to the Leonard Baskin Papers and the recently acquired Ted Hughes
materials.11 In fact, one online description notes an unpublished Plath poem about
Christmas. Having requested the notebook in which this poem was located, I was
somewhat excited to sit down at the desk in the large manuscript reading room and
open the folder.
As always in this situation, there is a slightly increased heart rate. Just handling
this material is such a privilege, but I was also uncertain what I would find. The
unpublished poem listed was undated, but the fact that it was contained in a notebook
belonging to Hughes at least placed it post-1956. The book itself was quite delicate, the
back cover detached. It was a deep wine in colour with "Tudor Duplicate Book 100
sheets in triplicate" printed on the front. Each page was a little musty, and the book felt
as though it had not been opened for many years (although clearly this was not the
case). Every page was full of astrological charts drawn in Hughes' hand – birth and
death charts for people he knew, famous poets and musicians, charts for significant
historical events, charts for people who had been diagnosed with cancer and
degenerative diseases. There was something very unnerving, very eerie about this
collection of charts and swirls and symbols. On page 38 of the book, there were two
astrological birth charts for Sylvia Plath, a chart for her first suicide attempt which
Hughes places as mid-afternoon on August 24, 1953, and a death chart which he has
timed and dated as 11th February 1963, 5-7am. There is a birth and death chart for
Assia Wevill on page 42 and birth charts for Plath's children Frieda and Nicholas. Yet
curiously, almost in the center of the book, amid these circles and symbols and signs,
the pages open into a double spread of Plath's own handwriting – that distinctive black
ink, the bold lettering and here we see Plath playing with images about Christmas. What
struck me immediately was that this was not a serious poem. In fact, if I had to take a
guess, I think this could date to the periodic attempts Plath and Hughes made at
11
Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) was an American sculptor who taught print making and sculpture at Smith College
from 1953 until 1974. It was while Plath was teaching at Smith that she and Hughes became friendly with Baskin
and his wife Esther.
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entering jingle and advertisement competitions. What Plath was writing seemed like a
message from inside a festive greeting card as she toyed with a series of Christmas
images – family gatherings, the look on children's faces, plum puddings and the star on
the top of the tree. She made five attempts at this, with some of the verses decorated
with swirly lines and black stars. While on the one hand it was disappointing not to find
an undiscovered, blasting Plath poem unearthed from the depths of the archives, it was
delightful to find, in her own hand, doodlings and a more playful Plath, observing how
her ideas changed and developed and even with something seemingly so trivial, the
odd classic Plath flourish in a description.12
PKS: I am more than 3,000 miles away but, like a CCTV network, it feels as though I am with
Gail, peering over her shoulder. Original Plath materials are almost like photographs of her.
However, instead of capturing her physical likeness at a given moment of time, it captures,
physically, her intellectual creativity. Just as Sontag states, "after the event has ended, the picture
will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never
otherwise have enjoyed" (11). I feel the same holds true for both an original Plath work in
manuscript, as well as in some way, materials (correspondence/conversations) about her as well.
The Plath-related holdings in the archive at the University of Maryland are in the Frances
McCullough Papers. McCullough was Plath's posthumous editor at Harper & Row, the Dial
Press and Bantam, and I found out about the collection via a search of Plath archival materials on
WorldCat.13 The papers are largely editorial in nature, including editor's proofs and
correspondence regarding some of her major works, including Letters Home (1975), Johnny
Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1979) and The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982). The archivist I
dealt with, Beth Alvarez, was very accommodating, given that a virtual barrage of queries began
via email. She sent me a preliminary folder list and from that I decided it was best to visit the
archive.
I never know what to expect from a new repository. Each has their own policies and
procedures to which one must adhere.14 Some allow photography; some do not. I had only one
12
Due to copyright reasons, The Estate of Sylvia Plath does not allow any quotations from unpublished materials.
This notebook can be found in ADD MS 88918/12/8 4074F.
13
WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org), is a website where libraries from around the world can list their holdings.
14
And hours, too. Embarrassingly, I flew from Boston to Baltimore on a 6 a.m. flight to arrive by 9 a.m. at the doors
of the Hornbake Library, only to find out that the archive opened at 10.
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day there to look through many boxes and folders, so I worked as thoroughly and feverishly as I
could. In reviewing editorial materials for Winter Trees (1972), I noticed two details that were
new to me: first, that an early title for the volume, which was abandoned, was blandly Late Poems
and Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices; and second, that in the preliminary pages of the U. S.
edition of Winter Trees there is a "Caution," which is absent from the British edition:
(iv)
This makes me feel that the Plath Estate feels that American readers are a bunch of lawless
thieves, eager to produce her poems for audiences across the U. S., stealing royalty monies from
the Estate. Similarly, it perhaps explains why the American edition of Ariel included a
"Foreword" by Robert Lowell and for The Bell Jar, a "Biographical Note" by Lois Ames; as
though in addition to being thieves, Plath's American fans need assistance or instruction in
reading works by Plath's.
In her professional papers, McCullough appears to have had access to a wealth of Plath
material, though mostly in photocopy. There is voluminous correspondence regarding
publications, both those that came to print and those that did not. Of those that did not, perhaps
the majority related to a planned book of essays entitled "Recollections of Sylvia Plath," which
was to be edited by Lois Ames. Ames at that time had been appointed the official biographer of
Sylvia Plath, but failed to produce in both respects. There are also copies of correspondence from
Plath to people such as Olive Higgins Prouty and Richard Murphy.
In the McCullough collection, I was particularly interested to see the photographs. It was
in this series that my heart almost skipped a beat.
GC: Finding original correspondence in an archive is always exciting, because it is one
of those rare opportunities when you get to see an unabridged Plath letter, often with
additions in her own hand. At Maryland in the McCullough papers, Peter was exploring
copies of letters Plath had written to Olive Higgins Prouty and Richard Murphy. In The
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British Library, we had unearthed in the online catalogue that described the BaskinHughes correspondence, some original letters and poetry manuscripts of Plath's. As
mentioned earlier, often online descriptions can be misleading, so I was prepared to find
something quite different. However, rather wonderfully, there in the Baskin-Hughes
papers are indeed original letters from Plath.15 The first is a typed batch of four poems:
"Sow," "The Earthenware Head," "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" and "November
Graveyard, Haworth."16 The first page of "Sow" has Plath's 337 Elm Street,
Northampton address typed in the top right hand corner of the page and on the top left,
in her own black inked handwriting is written "For Esther and Leonard/May 24
1958/Sylvia Plath." It is the minutiae that fascinate me with documents like this. For
example, the "F" of the "For" is not in Plath's usual hand, but rather more elaborate, as
though she were making an effort to make the manuscript decorative. Yet the words
"For Esther" are, rather endearingly, smudged upwards, as though she brushed the ink
a little too soon after writing. Such small details for me in an archive really re-animate
Plath, somehow making her more human and real. For Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny
Hockey, it is the durability of these cultural artefacts that bring the dead back to us:
"Material culture mediates our relationship with death and the dead; objects, images
and practices, as well as places and spaces, call to mind or are made to remind us of
the deaths of others. Material objects invoke the dead" (2). These letters and
manuscripts tell us that Plath typed this, her hands have touched it, used it, created it. In
other words, she can be invoked. Her things remind us of her death and help to bring
her back.
Further in the same folder is a beige-grey cardboard folder with "The Grecourt
Review" printed on the front, and inside is a copy of "Sculptor," the poem Plath
dedicated to Leonard Baskin after visiting his studio.17 On the inner leaf of the folder,
again in Plath's hand, she has written: "For Esther and Leonard/July 7 1959/With
15
These can be found in the following folder: ADD MS 83687 3024A
It is worth noting that this final poem is mistakenly described by Ted Hughes in Collected Poems as being about
Heptonstall Churchyard. Evidently at some point, Plath removed "Haworth" from the title.
17
This would have been an offprint, likely specifically produced as a contributor copy for Plath to distribute or
possibly to keep for her own papers. The rare book market value of "Sculptor" is through the roof, with two copies
currently for sale for $3,500 and $4,228.97 (£2,195.07 and £2,500), respectively.
16
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love/Sylvia."18 This is one of the earlier examples of how certain people and places
influenced Plath's writing, how a visual image of an artist's studio, taken in by the eye
became transformed into a textual play of words. But Plath was also sensitive to other
locations in which she lived and visited. Consider the places that appear in her writing:
Winthrop, Yaddo, Yorkshire, Cambridge, even the wallpaper in her Chalcot Square flat.
But in her later Ariel poems, it is Devon that features heavily: her bees, her apple
orchard and the elms on her ancient Roman mound situated in the garden at Court
Green.
PKS: There are a few photographs of Plath or related sites in the McCullough papers. A couple
were taken by Gordon Lameyer, her boyfriend from 1953-1954, and were used to illustrate his
unpublished manuscript, "Who is Sylvia?"19 But the photograph to which I referred to earlier –
the one which made my heart jump – is a scenic view of Court Green:
18
Interestingly, there is also an identical folder, this time containing a poem by Ted Hughes: "Roosting Hawk" and
in Hughes' hand: "For Esther and Leonard/love Ted" also located in ADD MS 83687 3024A.
19
Indiana University holds an unpublished Lameyer manuscript entitled "Dear Sylvia." This is a similar manuscript
to "Who is Sylvia?" and includes Lameyer's letters to Plath. Also with this archive, in the Lameyer Mss. are
photographs and color slides of Lameyer and Plath. See http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/guides/plath/lameyer.shtml
for more information.
Plath Profiles
133
Above we see Court Green from circa June 1972, likely from the perspective near the
"wall of old corpses" Plath writes about in her poem "Letter in November" (253). The
photograph was taken by Frances McCullough's husband, David Willis McCullough, and it is
one of three of the Court Green and its property. What is worth pointing out are the grouping of
trees in the top right of the image. As Plath writes in the poem named for these very Wych elm
trees: "What is this…in it's strangle of branches?—" (Collected Poems 193).
Just as a Plath manuscript can re-vivify the writer, so too can an image such as this,
which calls to mind the inspiration to one of Plath's most famous poems. In a letter written to her
mother on January 18, 1962, after the birth of her son Nicholas, in language she would mirror in
her poem "Elm," Plath writes of "a full moon tonight in our huge elm" (Letters Home 443). The
branches are indeed a "snaky" "hand of wires," and one can indeed imagine the "caught" rising
moon (193, 192). The elm is featured in two additional spring 1962 poems, "Pheasant" and
"Three Women." In "Three Women," the first voice complacently remarks "Dawn flowers in the
great elm outside the house" and in "Pheasant," the very bird "Settles in the elm, and is easy" in
spite of its being marked for death (Collected Poems 185, 191).
The trees are gone, killed in the 1970s most likely by Dutch Elm disease which began to
affect elm trees in England after 1967.20 The elms figure in a two additional photographs held in
the McCullough papers.21 One is below, and is a portrait-oriented photograph of the elms. The
third photograph in which the elms appear also may have captured a branch of the laburnum.
Plath included an image of the laburnum in two of her fall 1962 poems. In "The Arrival of the
Bee Box" the speaker muses "I wonder if they would forget me / If I just undid the locks and
stood back and turned into a tree. / There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades" and in "Letter in
November": "The streetlight / Splits through the rat's-tail / Pods of the laburnum at nine in the
morning" (213, 253). Hughes wrote a poem entitled "The Laburnum," which beings: "Tell me /
We shall sit together this summer / Under the laburnum" (Hughes, Collected Poems 1176). The
poem hints at the significance of this tree to the couple from their one spring under its "blond
colonnades" in 1962.
Now, below, are the elms.
20
21
For more on this, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease#Europe.
The photographs are in box 13 of the McCullough Papers.
Crowther & Steinberg
134
Plath Profiles
135
It is the first opportunity in a generation, perhaps, to see these trees. It places or grounds
"Elm" in a similar way that Plath's "The Moon and the Yew Tree" and "Letter and November"
locate the view west from Court Green's windows. However, to place the elms in our readers
minds when considering the layout of Court Green, we turn to a Google satellite image which
has been touched up in Photoshop with a shakily drawn outlines to indicate where the elm trees
(white) were and where the yew tree is (blue) in relation to the house.
GC: In conversation with Plath's friend, Elizabeth Sigmund, we were able to determine
that the position of the elm trees also held another significance, in that they were atop
the Roman mound which Plath writes so eloquently about in her letters (see Letters
Home 452).22 This was also confirmed by Anne Stevenson in Bitter Fame, when she
describes the location of the elms as "shouldering" the roman mound" (222). Thus the
elm photograph that we see from 1972 does that wonderful thing that photographs often
do, which is to give us just as much on the periphery as the main punctum of the image.
The second special "peripheral" to be captured – if you look carefully again at the elm
image above– is Plath's old car parked directly beneath the trees. Hughes kept this car
22
On page 452 of Letters Home, Plath writes from Court Green in Devon: "We even had an antiquarian come to
visit our Ancient Mound last Sunday!"
Crowther & Steinberg
136
for many years until it
literally fell apart and
here we are able to see
the Morris Traveller that
Plath drove around
those Devonshire lanes.
Although the image is
black and white, and
does not capture the
whole car, Elizabeth
Sigmund informed me
that Plath's car was all
black (Elizabeth herself had a dark green version). In fact, Elizabeth owns a small
model of Plath's car bought because it was an exact replica.
And so this image discovered in the McCullough papers offers us so much more
than it would initially seem on the surface. Susan Sontag describes this "giving" nature
of photographs as thus - that a photograph is not only an interpretation of the real, "it is
also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask"
(154). In this case, we again see, as we have so many times before, how the archives
give up their ghostly remains.
The archives of Sylvia Plath, though perused by hundreds – if not thousands – of scholars over
the last thirty or so years, continue to challenge their users to dig deep, like the "miner" of "Nick
and the Candlestick" (Collected Poems 240). We hope this paper has shown that through a
combination of internet querying, in-person research, and the kind selflessness of librarians and
archivists, that new Plath material – photographs, poetry, correspondence, etc. – can indeed be
found and can contribute to our still growing understanding of Plath's life and work. Also,
through new collections such as the McCullough Papers and the much anticipated Olwyn
Hughes material recently purchased by The British Library, the editorial and posthumous works
will begin to unravel, and the "other side" of Plath studies can begin to be studied.
Plath Profiles
137
We never know what we will truly find in an archive, no matter how many visits. And,
perhaps it is with fresh eyes, that new materials will be found. This paper concludes with the
hope that such a thing will come true, as Peter plans a return trip to Smith College and to other
newly learned-of archives and Gail prepares to sail to America for her very first visit…
Crowther & Steinberg
138
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, 1982. Print.
Brinati, Teresa. "Hey, Good Lookin'!" Archival Outlook. January/February 2011: 3. Print.
Hallam, Elizabeth & Jenny Hockey. Death, Memory and Material Culture. Oxford, New York:
Berg, 2001. Print.
Hughes, Ted. Collected Poems. Ed. Paul Keegan. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Print.
---. Letters of Ted Hughes. Ed. Christopher Reid. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. Print.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Print.
---. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. London: Faber & Faber, 1977. Print.
---. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. London: Faber & Faber, 2000. Print.
---. Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963. Ed. Aurelia Schober Plath. London: Faber &
Faber, 1975. Print.
---. Winter Trees. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Print.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977. Print.
Stevenson, Anne. Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. London: Viking. 1989. Print.
Acknowledgements
Photograph of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Oscar Williams courtesy of the Lilly Library,
Indiana University at Bloomington, Indiana. Not to be reproduced without permission.
Photograph of the elm trees at Court Green courtesy of David Willis McCullough and the
University of Maryland at College Park. Not to be reproduced without permission.
Photograph of the black Morris Traveller copyright Gail Crowther & Elizabeth Sigmund. Not to
be reproduced without permission.